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Going all the way with MovableType

August 5, 2005
· Martin Kelley

An
ear­ly descrip­tion of my using the Mov­able Type blog­ging plat­form as a
con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem (CMS) for an entire web­site. I’ve used these
tech­niques to build web­sites which clients can eas­i­ly manip­u­late and
update.

Inspired by Doing Your Whole Site with MT
on Brad Choate’s site, I start­ed exper­i­ment­ing today with putting the
whole Non​vi​o​lence​.org site into Mov­able Type. At first I thought it was
just a tri­al exper­i­ment but I’m hooked. I espe­cial­ly love how much
clean­er the entry for the links page now looks and I might actu­al­ly be inspired to keep it up to date more now. (I’ve also inte­grat­ed Choate’s MT-Textile which makes a big dif­fer­ence in keep­ing entries clean of HMTL garbage, and the semi-related Smar­ty­Pants which makes the site more typo­graph­i­cal­ly ele­gant with easy M‑dashes and curly quotes).

So here’s what I’m doing: there are three Mov­able Type blogs inter­act­ing with one anoth­er (not includ­ing this per­son­al blog):

  • One is the more-or-less stan­dard one that is pow­er­ing the main home­page blog of Non​vi​o​lence​.org.
  • The sec­ond I call “NV:Static” which holds my sta­t­ic pages, much as Brad out­lines. I put my desired URL path
    into the Title field (i.e., “info/index”) and then put the page’s real
    title into the Key­words field (i.e., “About Non​vi​o​lence​.org”) and have
    that give the data for the title field and the first head­line of the
    page. It might seem back­wards to use Title for URL and then use Key­words for Title, but this means that when I’m in MT look­ing to edit a par­tic­u­lar file, it will be the URL paths that are listed.
  • The third blog is my “NV:Design Ele­ments.” This con­tains the block
    of graph­ics on the top and left of every page. I know I’ll have to
    redesign this all soon and I can do it from wher­ev­er. This blog outputs
    to HTML. All the oth­er pages on the site are PHP and its a sim­ple include to pull the top and left bars into each PHP page.

Oh yes, I’m also think­ing of incor­po­rat­ing guest blogs in the near
future and all of these ele­ments should make that much easier.

Here’s anoth­er site to check out, about how some­one inte­grat­ed Mov­able Type into their church web­site using some inter­est­ing techniques.

Army of None

July 17, 2003
· Martin Kelley

I’ve always found U.S. Army recruit­ing adver­tis­ing fas­ci­nat­ing. It’s not just that the ads are well-produced. They catch onto basic human yearn­ings in a way that’s the teen equiv­a­lent of self-help books. “Be all that you can be” is won­der­ful – who would­n’t want that. And the cur­rent ads mak­ing the Army look like a extreme sport also hits the nexus of cool and inspir­ing. The cur­rent US Army slo­gan is “An Army of One,” which might almost make poten­tial recruits for­get that a basic cor­ner­stone of mil­i­tary train­ing is wip­ing away indi­vid­u­al­i­ty to mold recruits into inter­changable units. The link above is to “Army of None,” a smart par­o­dy of the offi­cial recruit­ing site.

The Bean Defense

July 15, 2003
· Martin Kelley

Read­ers might remem­ber the field day I had a few weeks ago when US occu­py­ing forces announced they had uncov­ered a cache of beans. They claimed Sad­dam Hus­sein had stock­piled a few hun­dred bags of cas­tor beans to use to make a bio­log­i­cal agent called ricin. In my postUS: Iraqis Planned Oper­a­tion Fart and Stink I point­ed out that the sup­posed weapons worked on the well-documented prin­ci­ple that beans can pro­duce gas and indi­ges­tion – ricin just works espe­cial­ly well and con­cen­trates the effect enough to kill some­one in a par­tic­u­lar­ly messy way.

What I did­n’t do was Google ricin and Iraq. Today I did and found this fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle that I missed at the time. U.S. Sec­re­tary of State Col­in Pow­ell claimed an Iraq/ricin con­nec­tion before the House Inter­na­tion­al Rela­tions Com­mit­tee back in ear­ly February:

“The ricin that is bounc­ing around Europe now orig­i­nat­ed in Iraq — not in the part of Iraq that is under Sad­dam Hus­sein’s con­trol, but his secu­ri­ty forces know all about it,” Pow­ell said.

Euro­pean intel­li­gence sources quick­ly dis­cred­it­ed this claim, point­ing out that it was obvi­ous the Euro­pean ricin was home-made and not Iraqi. The French were “stunned” that Pow­ell would make such a obviously-wrong state­ment, and the British flat­ly stat­ed they were “clear” that that ricin found in Lon­don was­n’t pro­duced in Iraq.

Here we have anoth­er instance of a senior US offi­cial claim­ing an easily-disprovable claim of Iraqi weapons of mass destruc­tion, just weeks after the now-infamous Niger/Iraq forgery appeared in the Pres­i­den­t’s State of the Union address. Pow­ell and oth­ers in the U.S. have trot­ted out the ricin threat repeat­ed­ly yet it’s hard to make a weapon out of the stuff. It’s real­ly only ever been used for a ridicu­lous James Bond-like assas­i­na­tion in 1991, when a Bul­gar­i­an agent is sup­posed to have killed a dis­si­dent in Lon­don using a ricin-filled pel­let fired from an umbrel­la tip (one is remind­ed of Austin Pow­er’s Dr. Evil: “I’m going to place him in an eas­i­ly escapable sit­u­a­tion involv­ing an over­ly elab­o­rate and exot­ic death”). As one site points out The cur­rent wis­dom among bio­log­i­cal defense experts is that ricin is more like­ly to be used as a tool in assas­si­na­tions than as a weapon of mass destruction.

There is a clear pat­tern of the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion delib­er­ate­ly mis-interpreting Iraqi threats to make the case for war. These are pur­pose­ful decep­tions with only the thinnest escape clause to wig­gle through when the lies are exposed. Col­in Pow­ell isn’t stu­pid enough to make this kind of repeat­ed mis­take and a year of dis­proven ricin alerts is a mark against the Admin­is­tra­tion’s integrity.